Lean is a powerful methodology that enables managers and employees to shift their mindset and helps companies to keep their business sustainable by creating competitive advantage. Today, in an increasingly complex and dynamic world, where companies struggle to maintain competitive advantage, Lean is more important than ever.
This course combines the experience of many senior experts and practitioners from the Boston Consulting Group and École des Ponts, and brings perspectives on Lean in manufacturing and services. It offers strong topic foundation as well as deep practical insights into the art of continuous improvement.
In this course, you will learn:
- why Lean is a key driver for sustainable competitive advantage
- how different companies can leverage Lean to create value both in manufacturing and services
- what it takes to drive a Lean transformation and build a culture of continuous improvement
- how new technologies impact traditional lean practices

Taught By

Aurélie Delemarle, Ph.D

Academic Chair, Industrial Engineering Department

Dr. Thomas Frost

Expert Principal

Salvatore Cali

Expert Principal

Elsa Blume

Senior Learning & Development Specialist

Transcript

Value stream mapping is one of the key tools of the beginning of a lean implementation. It is used to create transparency across the whole value stream, and it helps to identify pain points or waste along the way. Value stream mapping includes all process steps required to make a product, from the beginning to the end. There are two key parts of a value stream map, it's the material flow and the information flow. Once you have performed initial value stream mapping, as the next step you typically design a new one. Considering all improvements, it is called the value stream design. Based on the value stream design, the improvement targets for the next 12 to 18 months are defined, and deployed, to the whole organization. Value stream mapping is employed in four steps. First, you select the product or a product family, so it could be, for example, a car or a chocolate, or whatever, it depends really on the industry that you're in. Second, you map the current state of the process involved to make the product, from the beginning to the end. And the important thing is here that you highlight all the pinpoints. So all the areas, for example, people are struggling with, or the whole value stream is not aligned, problems are not aligned. So you need to highlight those pain points, and based on that, think also what the improvements are. Third, you map the future state of this process. This future state includes all improvements and adjustments of the process. So it needs to be, on one hand, really challenging, but also realistic, that you can achieve it within a defined timeframe of typically about 12 to 18 months. Last, you design an implementation plan listing all activities needed to achieve the future process. So the implementation plan should assign clear responsibilities to stakeholders, and for sure it includes deadlines, and doing meetings to track the progress systematically. So to get a little bit more practical, let's look at the example of registry mapping. And what you see, this is for sure just a simplified version of your value stream mapping. Typically, it's much more complex, however, what you see in general, there are two important things I'll mention to you. On one hand, it's information flow at the top. On the other hand, it's about the material flow at the bottom. So typically, it starts with the customer. The customer tells the factory, or in this case, the planning department, what his requests are. Then planning starts to talk with the supplier, what kind of material or components they need for the entire production process. And what you see then, a little truck over there, this is a material flow, the material coming in to the factory, going through each one of the production steps. And at the end of the whole value chain here, you have the final product going up, again, to your customer. So this is a really simplified version of value stream mapping. So finally I would like you to remember these key points about value stream mapping and value stream design. The first one is that value stream mapping really creates transparency, which is important, a starting point for lean. So it uncovers problems which lead to waste. The important thing about waste here is that it can be only eliminated by fixing the root cause, rather than just creating workarounds. The third thing is that the registry and design really helps companies to get understanding for waste, and how to eliminate it, based on a clear implementation plan. So this is something they really need to follow with clear responsibilities and timeline. And last but not least, the registry can continuously be improved. So that means you don't do it just once, but after period of times, for example, one year. You should run the exercise again and look for other opportunities for improvement.

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